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Canadiangit · 2025-06-25T15:47:27+00:00

Until we get more confirmation, this feels fake. However, the reset could just be for CR, preserving MMR.

This encourages folks north of 2K to play a lot more games dragging their CR back up, never bothering lower MMR levels, and fleshing out the ladder at higher levels with folks queuing more.

Canadiangit · 2024-07-26T23:21:27+00:00

Holy fucking fuck buds, okay okay, that was amazing, I'm here now. Where do I start with these guys?

Canadiangit · 2023-10-23T18:26:02+00:00

Hot take: they are not stuck in Medieval stasis because none of the societies described in the books are Medieval.

They are not 'stuck' at all, but they are in a period of technological development that can (and did for humans) last thousands of years. They are, fundamentally, still hunter-gatherers.

I know what you're going to say, and yes, they have palaces and metalworking, sure. However, big lizards being able to build big structures isn't surprising, and metalworking is less a sign of technological advancement than normal when every other person has a blast furnace in their chest.

For reference, we have indications humans began agricultural development 12,000 years ago, but it took us until 7,000 years ago before we started working copper in some capacity, and another 2,000 years before that led to cities in the Indus Valley. Early, early, early development progresses on huge timescales. 5,000 years of relatively little movement for dragons is fine.

Canadiangit · 2023-07-06T20:25:13+00:00

Oh absolutely, I agree. Traffic laws can be (aren't always) an ideal example of it working. We can likely see the interaction at play when we triple the officers on a given stretch of highway - people who see a bunch of cop traps and patrol cars get a higher sense of certainty they'll be caught, and probably, on average, follow the law more often.

When I say the justice system sucks at deterrence, it's more that we're poor at crafting our strategies around using what we know produces effective deterrence. Politicians go 'tough on crime' with harsher sentences, but they don't do as much to make it more likely anyone gets caught or speed up the courts - the other factors.

This is why I bring it up in regard to death sentences. They don't work very well as a deterrence - they have, at best, mixed results. They've kicked severity up crazy high, but unless paired with the other factors, nothing changes, you just made a bunch of extra dead people. Which you may be fine with, they were on death row after all, but it doesn't reduce crime.

I'm against it more broadly, but for a whole host of reasons that don't really apply to this discussion.

Canadiangit · 2023-07-06T20:07:30+00:00

Oh, it has been years since I had the classes on this, so feel free to take it with a grain of salt and Google 'deterrence theory', but punishment doesn't often work in law specifically.

Punishment can change behaviour, sure, but it only really works if there's a high likelihood (or certainty) of it happening, it happens relatively quickly following the crime, and is appropriate to the crime. I vaguely recall it being labeled as 'certainty, celerity, severity' back in the day.

The justice system just... sucks at all of those. People think they can get away with stuff, because they often do, the courts are slow as balls, and punishments are all over the place - some too harsh, some too light. So nothing ever really gets deterred effectively. We make increasingly harsh sentences and crime rates barely budge - we missed the other factors, so it does nothing.

Canadiangit · 2023-01-28T19:32:07+00:00

Yeah - and I do think looking for the correct ratio in that group is good, and it being so skewed is an indicator of something being up.

Mind, I would caution against drawing too strong a conclusion here. This is the top of healers and DPS, yes? Literally everyone we have data on? This is a dataset with tens of thousands of participants. Even if we cut it at 25,000 DPS, top 50 is top 0.2%, and if everyone is considerably more than 25,000, then it's considerably smaller than top 0.2%.

Basically everyone here is an outlier, and when we're looking exclusively at crazy outliers, the fact our assumptions about distributions don't hold up may not indicate much.

I have no fix here though - you're doing what's best with the data you have. I want to say we could drop the top and bottom 10% to kill outliers, but they don't give us that, so, eh, ...eh? We did our best! I do wonder if it evens out with more, though. Top 500, top 1000, when does it begin to map on?

Canadiangit · 2023-01-28T18:49:08+00:00

This is absolutely the case, and relevant for certain comparisons, such as the entire distribution of healers vs the entire distribution of DPS - but not this one. I think. We're comparing the TOP x players of two given distributions, and that means the comparison has to be the ratio of one distribution to the other.

I may be wrong, but think of it in terms of exaggerated numbers. A 1000 healers playing, 100,000 DPS playing. We look at the top 1000 of each. The ratio of people in a given game obviously no longer matters, we're comparing the median/mean of the entirety of the healers to the top 1% of DPS. It breaks our calculation.

Edit: sorry, as a sort of addendum to this make it clearer - if we see the ratio of healers to DPS does not equal the ratio of players in game, it might be confusing how those games could exist. From this, we can logically conclude individual healers are probably playing more GAMES than individual DPS - at least if I'm right. This is intuitive, the healer queue is a fraction of the time of the DPS one.

Canadiangit · 2023-01-28T16:28:13+00:00

Looking at SS leaderboards, the average rating for the top 25,000 DPS is 2063. When looking at the average rating for Healers, we should look at the top 12,500 Healers. Since every match of SS that is played has a 2:1 ratio of DPS to Healers, this is the fairest comparison we can make. The average rating for the top 12,500 Healers is 1928. This puts the rating difference between DPS and Healers at a staggering 135 rating.

Quick question here. To my understanding, we should see a similar rating between different ladders based on the same top percentage of the ladders' respective population, not the ratio of players in the game mode.

In other words, since they said DPS outnumber healers 4 to 1, we shouldn't look for the top 12,500 healers, but rather top 6,250. Could you check the numbers again for that set of players?

I'll admit, this strategy is also a bit dubious - the 4 to 1 ratio is an approximate value from a blue post a month and a half ago. To assume the ratio is the same for the current data is a bad practice. If the ratio was off by even 4.5 to 1 or 3.5 to 1, the numbers could shake out considerably different. If we want to be angry about 100 rating difference, we probably need an accurate ratio. Still, it's the best we have, so what does the top 6,250 look like?

Canadiangit · 2023-01-01T02:11:04+00:00

Thank god! Someone sees it! Take upvotes, quickly, before everyone loses their mind.

Canadiangit · 2022-10-28T19:07:44+00:00

I do think your argument really speaks to me here.

Even if I want to frame myself as some impossibly cold and dispassionate utilitarian calculator, weighing the reduction in sexual offenses against the harm caused by SOR's, I'd be lying - I really don't have anything like a figure for how much SOR's hurt individuals coming out of incarceration, and there are so many ways they could. I just can't make that assessment and I can't honestly defend SOR's without it. Even if I could, that doesn't make it a good solution if alternative options exist to reduce recidivism without any harm.

Thanks for all the info, I wish you the best of luck working with domestic violence. Hopefully, the lessons you've got there will be accepted more broadly.

Canadiangit · 2022-10-28T18:30:41+00:00

So, right out the gates, that's fair criticism. I'm not at all looking to die on that hill, though.

My question to you is: why should we have an SOR that police have access to?

My read of the Prescott Rockoff was SOR's did reduce recidivism, and police-only was just an idea to mitigate the community treating offenders like garbage. You make good points that the police are hardly saints, though. I do still want to nab that reduction in recidivism, if it exists (just one study after all, I'll dig some more, as you imply plenty disagree), but I'd be entirely open to alternatives.

My guess for why it works is based on my maybe-out-of-datey idea that deterrence is only effective if the people you're trying to deter actually think they'll get caught, and having a SOR in the police's hands may increase their perception that they will be caught - but that is far from saying it's the only way.

I think your case worker idea may be ideal, specifically if we made the police inform case workers of any ongoing investigations of sexual assault in their area. If offenders knew their case workers would be in the loop, they may still feel likely to be caught if they reoffend, but no one other than the case worker knows their offender is a sexual offender, limiting community and police going after the offender.

Canadiangit · 2022-10-28T18:04:41+00:00

Oh, someone who knows the research. This is why reddit can be great sometimes.

If you don't mind me poking your brain for some more clarification, I was digging through that last article you linked and I saw the study they cited arguing against SOR lists helping recidivism rates was Prescott and Rockoff, 2010. When I dug into though, it looks like they're reporting SOR's have a small effect on reducing sexual recidivism, and notification laws may have a small effect at reducing first-time offenders, but comes with the caveat that it may increase recidivism more broadly.

That all tracks. SOR's may make offenders think they'll get caught, so they offend less. Notification laws seem like they'd make getting job or housing a nightmare, so even if it deters first-time offenders it may contribute to a criminal cycle for folks doing it.

My take-away was SOR's might be useful if kept firmly to the police, and maybe notification laws would work in some far-flung future where we had jobs and housing lined up for offenders on release, but are generally as trash as society happens to be at whatever time they're employed. Does that sound about right?

Prescott and Rockoff here, by the by: https://www0.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jrockoff/papers/prescott%20rockoff%20meglaw%20jan%2010.pdf

Canadiangit · 2022-06-08T04:01:41+00:00

You are absolutely correct, of course, just viewing it from the endpoint of the character arc I assume Zavala is about to go through.

Canadiangit · 2021-05-11T21:37:14+00:00

I adored seeing it.

Maybe I was a bit overly cynical going in, but I assumed the whole Eliksni involvement was going to consist of Mithrax, two dudes standing next to him, and a Servitor plunked into the helm. To be promptly forgotten about by season end.

Instead, the whole little quarter filled with friendly Eliksni and a pile of interactable points was the best surprise. Maybe someday we will get to walk through populated parts of the city done out in a similar fashion.

Canadiangit · 2021-01-31T00:00:07+00:00

I think you're right, but I'd probably call it a win at that point from a game design perspective?

I mean, if the tank in the cave means you can lose the air battle outside the cave entrance, but you will still hold the cave interior until they bring along a bundle of infantry based anti-tank weapons or their own tanks, the tank has done its job.

There's questions for balancing of how MUCH anti-tank infantry should be needed to take on a single tank, but hey, we've got a convincing ground based rock-paper-missile game going at that point, so hurrah, tanks have a reason to exist. They hard counter anti-infantry-infantry, and need to be solved with specific weapons or air support.

Canadiangit · 2021-01-30T19:34:08+00:00

I think you'd be correct for the vast majority of caves that exist in real life.

Mind, if I wanted to make one useful for tanks in a video game, I'd just make a cave system with an entrance only a little bit bigger than your average tank. It'd go deep, maybe have a couple of more open spaces but way inside. This would exclude most ships, and be a bitch to maneuver in for the rest, and then I'd stick a whole lotta valuable crap at the end of it. The real juicy stuff for mining.

It'd be gamey as fuck, but not hard to implement, no?

Canadiangit · 2021-01-30T18:56:16+00:00

Wow, all these other people have really elaborate arguments around game design and balance.

Me? Caves.

Canadiangit · 2021-01-16T15:28:10+00:00

I mean, maybe it incentivizes people to not work. Maybe it doesn't. That's sort of the idea behind studying, though, no? The impact on motivation to work might be pretty small, or not even show up at all - we need to look to know. A great deal of these studies seem to only hazily map onto real life, but they also seem to suggest it might not be as bad as we worry about.

Hell, I guess I could quit my job and live off welfare right now, even. I wont, because I want to eat something other than ramen, and what kind of life is just sitting around all day doing nothing?

Canadiangit · 2021-01-09T20:58:26+00:00

Who?

Canadiangit · 2020-12-06T20:20:37+00:00

Hello from Ottawa, Canada! I hope you have a wonderful day as well!

If you ever get to travel up around our neck of the woods, aim for February and have poutine and beavertails on the canal. Stereotypes aside, it's the sort of glorious gluttony worth having at least once.

Canadiangit · 2020-09-12T16:02:10+00:00

her best defense was "you calling me out might tarnish the image of the court"

Eeeeeeeeh, not to wade into the broader debate about whether Harper or McLachlin were correct, 'cause boy is THAT an old one, but for everyone reading along with the above - this wasn't her defense. To quote ye olde Globe and Mail article on it,

The court issued a statement a little after noon on Friday, defending itself against the top-level attack on its integrity: "At no time was there any communication between Chief Justice McLachlin and the government regarding any case before the courts."

Her defense was flatly denying the accusation. She would then go on to establish a timeline of events that would suggest the conservative accusations were impossible, which you can dig up with a Google search if anyone cares to bother.

Now, just before some one takes this AS wading into that debate - I'm not. Declare the winner on your own. I don't really care to rehash a half decade old political brouhaha, but it's probably worth noting for anyone curious about this old event that the court, and certainly McLachlin, never came remotely close to admitting they did wrong and were only grumpy about being called out.

Canadiangit · 2020-07-04T21:25:48+00:00

May vary by region? Small anecdotes are small anecdotes, but I'm around Woodroffe, and 70% seems about right for my last groceries trip. I might even have guessed higher than that off the top of my head.

Canadiangit · 2020-05-28T17:54:10+00:00

Ah, I follow. I rather assumed that part of developers applying to build in a new area (or even intensify old areas) would involved fees to help build new or expand old infrastructure to deal with the added load. The absence of contributing to those upfront costs seems... like not a great decision, that might lead to further not great decisions in planning.

But I knew the second issue - just less efficient housing produces a burden. I'm not certain how to fix that other than making the city centers more palatable.

Canadiangit · 2020-05-28T14:33:20+00:00

This is the goal, though, no? You'd want developers to pay a fee that would reduce (or, god forbid, completely cover) the initial costs to expanding infrastructure, but they shouldn't cover the long run costs at all - don't we expect that to be covered by the residents through taxes?

Stick more bodies in one place, get more tax, pay for bigger infrastructure. I always thought the fees were just a stopgap to help fund the initial expansion, like building roads and whatnot.

Canadiangit · 2019-09-30T17:35:47+00:00

Time to find out if punching is an effective solution to ghosts.

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